Slave or Free and 11 Other Problem Solving Plays

Why this book?  This is a compilation of  58 years of playwriting  from “Impasse,” written in  1946 in William G. B. Carson’s  English 16 Playwriting Class at  Washington University, St. Louis, to  “Slave or Free.”  about Sacagawea and York of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. .  “Slave”  was chosen a finalist  out of 1100 scripts sobmitted for Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Annual Ten Minute Playwriting Contest, Humana Festival 2004.

Plays can be read,  but the passionate  desire of any playwright is to see  his or her plays performed before a live audience.  It is the greatest thrill of one’s life to see your creation sparkle  with  actors eloquently speaking your lines.

Unlike the loneliness of writing novels, short stories and non-fiction, playwriting is a wonderful collaborative process.  Actors help with  lines that don’t work or ideas you the playwright hadn’t even considered.  Directors bring you the reality of the production constraints with invaluable suggestions.  The lighting,  set designers and  sound people all make valuable contributions.

Collaboration is what’s different about playwriting.  My most ambitious collaboration was with four other playwrights for three Middletown plays performed from  1999 to 2001.  My hometown, Muncie, Indiana,  is  known as Middletown because of the Robert  and Helen  Lynd books.  Muncie is the “most studied city in the world,” according to modern day Middletown author-authority Theodore Caplow of the University of Virginia.  Middletown was also the subject for my doctoral dissertation based on the extensive 77-year-old Middletown  data collection of books, dissertations and Peter Davis PBS films housed at Ball State University’s Bracken Library.

It was  a natural evolvement  that Anne and I would collaborate (Read her Afterthoughts).  the Scripps-Howard   Birmingham Post-Herald.  Anne would attend play performances with me and patiently wait at the newspaper office while I wrote the review for the next morning’s editions.

The Post-Herald, where NY Times Executive Editor Howell Raines began his career, was one of the nation’s first JOAs, (joint operating agreement) a 1950 merger between Scripps-Howard’s Post and Newhouse’s Age-Herald and  the Birmingham

News.  Newhouse kept its building,  furnishing the presses, advertising and circulation. The Post’s offices and plant were dismantled and leased to the IRS, where I successfully survived my first IRS audit as a $100 a week reporter.Anne is my best editor and severest critic.Our collaboration is fairly recent except for “A Day the Weeds Grew.” Anne, whose relatives were very much a part of Gadsden